Chapter 558: The Fan Favorite Falls -- Itachi at Full Strength, Defeated!
Even with Complete Susanoo fully manifested, the pressure on Itachi's eyes remained entirely within what he could bear.
He could feel the Mangekyo rotating steadily in his eye sockets. No familiar stinging. No warm seep of blood from the corners. Nothing.
Under his original condition, maintaining Susanoo for even half a minute would have brought him down -- coughing blood at minimum, losing consciousness outright not out of the question. He had spent years operating within those limits with extreme care, treating every use of his eyes as a withdrawal against a dwindling account.
Itachi had always wanted his body to hold a little better. Not from any fear of dying. But because he needed it to last -- to hold together long enough to complete the final plan. Long enough to survive on the dregs of his life until Sasuke could be the one to end it.
What he had never imagined was that this -- a body with its illness suppressed, its vitality temporarily returned -- would come from the very person whose life he had spent everything arranging. Not his little brother. His counterpart from another world. The little sister he had never met, but who shared his blood.
After learning Satsuki's true identity, what rose in Itachi was not the anger of someone who had been deceived.
It was something closer to warmth.
He had spent his whole life deceiving people, and being deceived in return. He had long since made a habit of looking at everyone with measured suspicion as a default. But Satsuki was different. In terms of blood, they were effectively siblings. The chakra flowing through those eyes, that resonance of shared origin that he could feel in his own body -- no disguise in existence could replicate that.
His Mangekyo was telling him: the person across from him was family.
He had thought about this sometimes when Sasuke was small. Young Sasuke had always resembled their mother, Mikoto -- not in any sharp or striking way, but softer, more delicate. He would sometimes catch himself staring at Sasuke's face and thinking, vaguely, that if Sasuke had been a girl, she would probably have grown up to be genuinely lovely.
And now the Sasuke from another world was standing in front of him.
As a girl.
With those cold, stubborn eyes.
He wondered: did his counterpart in that world make the same decisions he had made? Massacre. Defection. Pushing the person he loved into a pit and watching from above. Arranging everything, and then waiting to die at that person's hands?
Something strange moved through Itachi as he looked at Satsuki, a feeling he couldn't quite categorize.
He didn't regret what he had done. But he found himself genuinely curious whether the version of himself in that other world had been thinking the same thoughts when he made those choices.
Satsuki looked at the massive red Complete Susanoo standing across from her and felt nothing particular stir in her expression.
She had no interest in slowly tormenting Itachi. That wasn't how she operated. She simply wanted to make the point -- to give this person, who had built his entire existence around the belief that he had the right to design other people's lives, a concrete understanding that there was a price for that.
The ground shuddered.
Vast ocular power poured outward from Satsuki's body. The purple Susanoo began to rise -- visibly, undeniably, at a rate that made the scale of what was happening impossible to mistake.
Half-body to full. Several meters to dozens. Dozens to a hundred. Still climbing.
Satsuki's Complete Susanoo didn't stop where Itachi's had stopped. It kept going. Higher. More massive. More present in a way that pressed against the air itself.
As someone who carried the same eyes that had once belonged to Otsutsuki Kaguya, the Progenitor of Chakra, Satsuki's Complete Susanoo at full release was not something that could be placed on the same scale as any ordinary Mangekyo Sharingan.
This was not a difference of degree. It was a difference of kind. The same kind of difference that exists between a single drop of water and the ocean. Between a grain of sand and the desert that contains it. Between a flicker of firefly light and the sun.
Itachi watched the purple giant climbing above him, his neck tilting back further and further, until he had no choice but to raise his entire head just to see its full height.
The sound of chakra condensing came from every direction -- low, resonant, like the voice of something ancient and vast asserting its presence.
The massive wave of energy radiating outward from Satsuki's Susanoo swept in every direction from its center. The air compressed until it screamed. The ground trembled. Trees came up by their roots. The rock faces in the distance took on fine networks of cracks.
This level of chakra concentration -- there had probably only been one era in which anyone had been capable of it. Thousands of years ago. The time of the Sage of Six Paths.
The tide of chakra emanating from Satsuki's Susanoo as it gathered was not a directed attack. It was simply the natural overflow that a Complete Susanoo produced at this scale -- ambient, uncontrolled, the kind of force that leaked from something too large to contain itself.
Just the overflow.
But even that overflow crashed into Itachi's red Susanoo the way a wave crashes into something that was never built to stop it.
The red armor started cracking at the chest. The cracks spread -- across every surface, along every inch of chakra-condensed bone and muscle. Then the structure gave way entirely, a detonation that was felt as much as heard, and Itachi's red Complete Susanoo came apart, dissolving into scattered red light that dispersed into the air.
Itachi fell.
His body hit the ground hard.
His vision was blurring. The bone-deep exhaustion and weakness that came from pushing past his limits was returning, and it was returning from somewhere very far down.
His fingers pressed against the earth, trying to push himself upright. His arms shook. Two attempts accomplished nothing.
He covered his mouth.
Coughed twice.
His palm came away warm.
The illnesses that Amaterasu Rei had been holding at bay had begun to push back, now that he had burned through the reserve her flames had temporarily restored.
There was something ironic about it. Even now, in this state, he was in better shape than he used to be. What he had just done -- driving Complete Susanoo to its limit in actual combat -- would previously have been impossible to survive. One use of Amaterasu used to leave him unable to stop coughing blood. He had never once dared maintain Susanoo for more than a minute.
Today, he had opened Complete Susanoo. And produced this small amount of blood. That was all.
He had no frame of reference for that. Previously, it wouldn't have been worth imagining.
"Sasuke..."
His voice was quiet and low. He was lying on the ground, the Mangekyo's light entirely faded from his eyes.
"...Will your future be this powerful..."
His chest rose and fell with shallow movements, each breath disturbing whatever was rebounding inside him. But he kept his eyes open, turned toward the figure standing a short distance away, and let those few words come out.
Satsuki looked at Itachi, no longer capable of putting up any resistance. If her Susanoo had finished gathering power before she stopped it, Itachi would not still be in this world.
"Sasuke..." His voice came again. Those eyes, emptied of any will to fight, held something he almost never let anyone see in him. "No, how should I... address you?"
"There's no need for that."
The reply was as indifferent as everything else she had said to him.
"...I see."
The disappointment in Itachi's voice was too quiet to fully hide, but he didn't push.
"Sasuke... I... it seems you were right."
He continued, voice dropping lower with each sentence. The image of that night filled his mind -- the night he made the decision to become something other than human. The night he believed he was acting from principle, raising his blade in service of peace.
He had moved through the Uchiha district and watched one person after another fall. The neighbors who used to greet him at the market stalls. The women who had held him when he was small enough to be held. The elderly couple who had handed him dango skewers at the summer festival.
He told himself it was for the village. For peace. For preventing a war that would have been worse.
He told himself these people were beyond the point of stopping. Their coup would have caused more deaths than this. He told himself this was the necessary sacrifice.
In the quiet hours of deep night, their faces would surface.
He had thought, sometimes -- not once, but in many different sleepless nights over many years -- that he might have genuinely gotten it wrong. Not in one single identifiable moment. But in the accumulation of all those moments, turning over in the dark.
He watched Sasuke grow up. Watched the child who used to follow behind him be slowly, year by year, replaced by something made of hatred. A voice inside him said, over and over: you were wrong.
But people were not tools to be discarded when they had served their purpose. Every person who had died under his blade had a name, a story, people who would wait for them and then stop waiting. Their faces in the moment of dying -- the terror, the incomprehension, the fury, the despair -- he remembered every single one. He had not been able to forget any of them, even across all these years.
That night, the Uchiha clan's combat forces had been handled by the man calling himself Uchiha Madara. The elite shinobi. The ones who would have resisted. The actual core members of the coup.
He didn't kill them.
What he killed with his own hands were mostly ordinary people. The girl who worked at the sweet shop. The old man who spent his days doing repairs at the tool store. The child who had been walking down the street holding their mother's hand.
He had told himself necessary sacrifice. Greater peace. But those justifications, when measured against those faces, had become harder and harder to hold onto.
In dreams he went back to that night. Watched the young Sasuke of those years. Watched the admiration in those eyes become confusion, confusion become incomprehension, incomprehension become hatred.
The voice inside him grew louder. But he was already too far gone to stop. He had taken too many wrong steps in the same direction. All he could do was keep moving forward until he reached the ending he had prepared for himself -- dying at the hands of the person he cared about most, leaving everything with him, disappearing along with his mistakes.
But now, lying on the ground in the dirt, Uchiha Itachi suddenly found the whole of it struck him as genuinely laughable.
He had arranged the path for everyone around him.
And he had never once asked any of them whether they wanted to walk it.